The Mars Moons Exploration’s mission: grab a piece of one of Mars’s moons and bring it back to Earth. Talk about a big job! No wonder this is the first time anyone’s ever attempted this.
Our inner Solar System has only three moons: one for Earth and two for Mars. Mars may have two moons, but they’re both relatively small. The smaller moon, Deimos, is about 6 miles across. Phobos is around double that, but, at 12 miles across, its diameter is still closer to the distance to your local grocery store than the size of Earth’s Moon (which is over 2,000 miles across).
Scientists want to bring a sample from Phobos back to Earth, which should hopefully help answer the question: How exactly did these Mars moons form? One possibility is that a giant impact on early Mars blasted debris into space that later became the moons. Another is that Phobos and Deimos started as asteroids that were captured by Mars’s gravity.
Until now, the only pieces of Mars that scientists have been able to study fell to Earth as meteorites, but these types of samples become contaminated as they travel through our atmosphere. A piece taken directly from Phobos, however, would be pristine.
The plan is for the spacecraft to fly past Deimos, send a rover onto Phobos, and later land to collect a sample that is expected to return to Earth in 2031. After all this, researchers are expecting a whopping… 10 grams of material. That’s the same as about two nickels! But scientists say that is enough, especially because they would be able to do several studies on each grain of material.
In The Origin of Saturn’s Intricate Rings, Professor Brian Cox visits the control center for Cassini, the spacecraft launched in 1997 that orbits Saturn. Cassini’s mission is to photograph Saturn’s rings and shed light on the origin story of the rings. Saturn behaves like a miniature Solar System with Saturn as sun, and moons that surround the rings, providing us the opportunity to learn about our own origin after the planets formed. This video is excerpted from BBC's Wonders of the Solar System, a spellbinding documentary series that explores the most extreme locations on Earth to explain how the laws of physics carved natural wonders across the Solar System.
In Exploring Mars, Professor Brian Cox describes the various spacecraft that have landed on Mars and what we have learned from each. Learn how each Mars exploration project yielded more information about the Red Planet, and what the roving laboratory, Curiosity, helped scientists learn about Mars that other spacecraft had not. This video is excerpted from BBC’s The Planets, a series that explores the dramatic lives of the eight planets in our Solar System.
In Challenges and Triumphs of Reaching the Red Planet, Dr. Adam Steltzner and his team work to solve the challenges of landing spacecraft on Mars, especially when dealing with heavier crewed flights. Learn how innovative approaches, such as using retropropulsion and landing sideways, may address these issues. This video is excerpted from BBC’s The Big Thinkers, Should We Go to Mars?, where Dr. Kevin Fong explores the complex scientific and technological hurdles of space exploration.
Travel past rocky planets, enormous gas giants, dazzling rings, and distant moons with clips from landmark BBC series including The Planets and Wonders of the Solar System. Explore the forces that shaped our celestial neighborhood, witness extreme planetary weather, uncover clues to the origins of Saturn’s rings, and investigate what Mars can tell us about the possibility of life beyond Earth.
Along the way, discover how planets form and change over billions of years, why neighboring worlds can be dramatically different from one another, and how scientists use spacecraft, telescopes, and other evidence to piece together their histories.
From towering Martian volcanoes to storms raging on distant planets, these BBC planets videos reveal a solar system filled with extremes, mysteries, and discoveries still waiting to be made.
Journey beyond the Solar System to explore exoplanets, distant stars, and the search for new worlds. From planets orbiting faraway suns to potentially habitable worlds light-years from Earth, discover how astronomers are uncovering new corners of the universe.
This Kahoot explores the science of exoplanet discovery, space exploration, and the technologies that allow us to detect and study worlds we cannot directly see while revealing how each new discovery expands our understanding of the cosmos.
Watch the related videos linked below, then take the Kahoot and see how much you know about the incredible worlds waiting to be discovered beyond our Solar System.
The article "Top 10 Heaviest Spacecraft Ever Launched" from BBC's Science Focus examines the most massive spacecraft to have flown in Earth's orbit and beyond.
In Traveling at the Speed of Light, narrator Kate Yule describes how Einstein's theory could allow humans to explore the cosmos, but to do so would involve traveling at the speed of light. Learn about Stephen Hawking’s Breakthrough Starshot, which aimed to develop a spaceship that could do just that. Zac Manchester from Stanford University has continued these efforts and developed sprites, which are tiny spacecraft that travel at a speed of 20% of the speed of light. This video is excerpted from BBC’s Einstein & Hawking: Masters of Our Universe, a mind-bending documentary that tells the story of how the two most famous scientists of the 20th Century transformed our understanding of the Universe and changed the world.
In The Grand Tour of Voyager 1, Professor Brian Cox discusses how the Voyager 1 spacecraft, launched in 1977, continues to send signals back to Earth from its journey to the outer reaches of our Solar System. Learn about the groundbreaking space exploration efforts of the Voyager missions, especially its role in mapping the solar wind’s reach and helping scientists understand the auroras occurring on distant planets like Jupiter and Saturn. Using images from the Hubble Space Telescope and data from Voyager 1, scientists are unraveling the mysteries of the Solar System's farthest edges.
The article "Does Our Solar System Have a Protective Wall?" from BBC's Science Focus explains the concept of the "heliopause," the boundary where the solar wind from the Sun meets the interstellar medium. This boundary, sometimes described as a "wall," plays a crucial role in protecting Earth from harmful cosmic rays.
The article "Water found buried under Mars equator" from BBC's Science Focus showcases the discovery of ice beneath Mars' equator using data from ESA's Mars Express spacecraft. This finding could be crucial for future human missions to Mars, as the ice deposits could provide a valuable water source.
NASA is attempting something it has never done before: rescuing a space telescope that's slowly falling toward Earth.
The Swift Space Telescope has spent more than 20 years helping scientists study some of the universe's most powerful explosions. It originally orbited about 600 kilometers (over 300 miles) above Earth. At that height, the atmosphere is normally very thin — but increased solar activity has been pushing more of the atmosphere outward, creating extra drag. That drag slowed Swift down and caused its orbit to drop to about 360 kilometers (a little over 225 miles) above Earth.
To save it, NASA launched a rocket carrying a fridge-sized robot called Link. Link will first take pictures of Swift to figure out the safest place to grab hold of it. Then, using three robotic arms and its thrusters, it will slowly push Swift back up into a higher orbit. The whole process could take several months.
The mission is risky, since NASA has never attempted a rescue like this before. But if it works, Swift could keep operating for another decade. A success could also give NASA a blueprint for rescuing other aging spacecraft in the future — including the Hubble Space Telescope.
The Mars Moons Exploration’s mission: grab a piece of one of Mars’s moons and bring it back to Earth. Talk about a big job! No wonder this is the first time anyone’s ever attempted this.
Our inner Solar System has only three moons: one for Earth and two for Mars. Mars may have two moons, but they’re both relatively small. The smaller moon, Deimos, is about 6 miles across. Phobos is around double that, but, at 12 miles across, its diameter is still closer to the distance to your local grocery store than the size of Earth’s Moon (which is over 2,000 miles across).
Scientists want to bring a sample from Phobos back to Earth, which should hopefully help answer the question: How exactly did these Mars moons form? One possibility is that a giant impact on early Mars blasted debris into space that later became the moons. Another is that Phobos and Deimos started as asteroids that were captured by Mars’s gravity.
Until now, the only pieces of Mars that scientists have been able to study fell to Earth as meteorites, but these types of samples become contaminated as they travel through our atmosphere. A piece taken directly from Phobos, however, would be pristine.
The plan is for the spacecraft to fly past Deimos, send a rover onto Phobos, and later land to collect a sample that is expected to return to Earth in 2031. After all this, researchers are expecting a whopping… 10 grams of material. That’s the same as about two nickels! But scientists say that is enough, especially because they would be able to do several studies on each grain of material.
In The Origin of Saturn’s Intricate Rings, Professor Brian Cox visits the control center for Cassini, the spacecraft launched in 1997 that orbits Saturn. Cassini’s mission is to photograph Saturn’s rings and shed light on the origin story of the rings. Saturn behaves like a miniature Solar System with Saturn as sun, and moons that surround the rings, providing us the opportunity to learn about our own origin after the planets formed. This video is excerpted from BBC's Wonders of the Solar System, a spellbinding documentary series that explores the most extreme locations on Earth to explain how the laws of physics carved natural wonders across the Solar System.
In Exploring Mars, Professor Brian Cox describes the various spacecraft that have landed on Mars and what we have learned from each. Learn how each Mars exploration project yielded more information about the Red Planet, and what the roving laboratory, Curiosity, helped scientists learn about Mars that other spacecraft had not. This video is excerpted from BBC’s The Planets, a series that explores the dramatic lives of the eight planets in our Solar System.
In Challenges and Triumphs of Reaching the Red Planet, Dr. Adam Steltzner and his team work to solve the challenges of landing spacecraft on Mars, especially when dealing with heavier crewed flights. Learn how innovative approaches, such as using retropropulsion and landing sideways, may address these issues. This video is excerpted from BBC’s The Big Thinkers, Should We Go to Mars?, where Dr. Kevin Fong explores the complex scientific and technological hurdles of space exploration.
Travel past rocky planets, enormous gas giants, dazzling rings, and distant moons with clips from landmark BBC series including The Planets and Wonders of the Solar System. Explore the forces that shaped our celestial neighborhood, witness extreme planetary weather, uncover clues to the origins of Saturn’s rings, and investigate what Mars can tell us about the possibility of life beyond Earth.
Along the way, discover how planets form and change over billions of years, why neighboring worlds can be dramatically different from one another, and how scientists use spacecraft, telescopes, and other evidence to piece together their histories.
From towering Martian volcanoes to storms raging on distant planets, these BBC planets videos reveal a solar system filled with extremes, mysteries, and discoveries still waiting to be made.
Journey beyond the Solar System to explore exoplanets, distant stars, and the search for new worlds. From planets orbiting faraway suns to potentially habitable worlds light-years from Earth, discover how astronomers are uncovering new corners of the universe.
This Kahoot explores the science of exoplanet discovery, space exploration, and the technologies that allow us to detect and study worlds we cannot directly see while revealing how each new discovery expands our understanding of the cosmos.
Watch the related videos linked below, then take the Kahoot and see how much you know about the incredible worlds waiting to be discovered beyond our Solar System.
The article "Top 10 Heaviest Spacecraft Ever Launched" from BBC's Science Focus examines the most massive spacecraft to have flown in Earth's orbit and beyond.
In Traveling at the Speed of Light, narrator Kate Yule describes how Einstein's theory could allow humans to explore the cosmos, but to do so would involve traveling at the speed of light. Learn about Stephen Hawking’s Breakthrough Starshot, which aimed to develop a spaceship that could do just that. Zac Manchester from Stanford University has continued these efforts and developed sprites, which are tiny spacecraft that travel at a speed of 20% of the speed of light. This video is excerpted from BBC’s Einstein & Hawking: Masters of Our Universe, a mind-bending documentary that tells the story of how the two most famous scientists of the 20th Century transformed our understanding of the Universe and changed the world.
In The Grand Tour of Voyager 1, Professor Brian Cox discusses how the Voyager 1 spacecraft, launched in 1977, continues to send signals back to Earth from its journey to the outer reaches of our Solar System. Learn about the groundbreaking space exploration efforts of the Voyager missions, especially its role in mapping the solar wind’s reach and helping scientists understand the auroras occurring on distant planets like Jupiter and Saturn. Using images from the Hubble Space Telescope and data from Voyager 1, scientists are unraveling the mysteries of the Solar System's farthest edges.
The article "Does Our Solar System Have a Protective Wall?" from BBC's Science Focus explains the concept of the "heliopause," the boundary where the solar wind from the Sun meets the interstellar medium. This boundary, sometimes described as a "wall," plays a crucial role in protecting Earth from harmful cosmic rays.
The article "Water found buried under Mars equator" from BBC's Science Focus showcases the discovery of ice beneath Mars' equator using data from ESA's Mars Express spacecraft. This finding could be crucial for future human missions to Mars, as the ice deposits could provide a valuable water source.
NASA is attempting something it has never done before: rescuing a space telescope that's slowly falling toward Earth.
The Swift Space Telescope has spent more than 20 years helping scientists study some of the universe's most powerful explosions. It originally orbited about 600 kilometers (over 300 miles) above Earth. At that height, the atmosphere is normally very thin — but increased solar activity has been pushing more of the atmosphere outward, creating extra drag. That drag slowed Swift down and caused its orbit to drop to about 360 kilometers (a little over 225 miles) above Earth.
To save it, NASA launched a rocket carrying a fridge-sized robot called Link. Link will first take pictures of Swift to figure out the safest place to grab hold of it. Then, using three robotic arms and its thrusters, it will slowly push Swift back up into a higher orbit. The whole process could take several months.
The mission is risky, since NASA has never attempted a rescue like this before. But if it works, Swift could keep operating for another decade. A success could also give NASA a blueprint for rescuing other aging spacecraft in the future — including the Hubble Space Telescope.